Brion Vibber wrote:
One chief reason for making these links available is to allow interwiki linking from *non-wikimedia* wikis as well. By using a single established prefix (WikiPedia:) you can link to any of our languages without begging third party site admins to add three hundred prefixes to their interwiki maps.
This is a very benevolent approach. :-) Still, the priority should be to make things work within the Wikimedia family. Making it easier for outside should never be more than an incidental byproduct arising out of making things easier for ourselves.
It would be nice to use the "real" URLs directly on our own wikis, of course, for the reasons you mention.
We already have noticeable opposition to using any kind of HTML; I don't see that these people would be made any happier by the need to write out full URLs. :-)
Ec